Want another blog about FOI (I’m guessing yes, if you’re here).
George Greenwood, an investigative reporter at The Times, has just launched the brilliantly named Relight my FOIA blog. It should be a fascinating read on his experience of using the Freedom of Information Act.
Meanwhile, what everyone else is getting out of FOI…
Winter fuel payments
An estimated 780,000 pensioners still eligible to receive the winter fuel payment will lose the benefit under Labour’s planned cuts.
The figures, published in response to a freedom of information request, are based on “equality analyses” which “are not impact assessments and not routinely published alongside secondary legislation”, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said.
It added that that while those with a disability will be disproportionately likely to retain the payment, “around 71% – 1.6 million – of people with a disability will still lose entitlement”.
Parking enforcement
Drivers flouting double yellow lines is a main reason for parking tickets in Hull.
A Hull Live Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed the most common reasons in the last year for motorists to get issued parking penalties by Hull City Council. In 2023/23, more than two thousand tickets were issued for non-authorised parking in permit zones, and over a thousand for parking in disabled bays without a disabled badge.
But double yellow line parking dwarfed these. There were almost 7,000 instances in Hull in the last financial year.
Mental health payouts
Herefordshire and Worcestershire NHS Trust paid more than £9million in settlement damages for poor care in its mental health and psychiatry services across five years.
According to a Freedom of Information Request, the combined payout of the five claims totalled £9,314,336.
The trust said the reason behind the high figure was due to an incident in 2013 where a patient had absconded from a psychiatric unit and suffered significant injuries that caused large care costs for the remainder of the person’s life.
Active travel
North Yorkshire Council has been criticised for spending £450,000 on consultants to help improve cycling and walking in Harrogate and Knaresborough without delivering any substantial schemes to date.
Councillors have grown increasingly frustrated at a perceived lack of progress in building new schemes in the area.
Cllr Andrew Timothy (Liberal Democrat, Stray, Woodlands and Hookstone) revealed the cost of these studies when he referred to a freedom of information request submitted by a resident and shared with him.
New dads
Almost 300 men aged over 50 have applied to become the legal father of a surrogate child over the past five years – and 43 of them are over 60, new figures reveal. And a total of 95 single men applied to become a parent, reflecting a growing trend in men, especially older men, having babies alone with the help of surrogates.
Since the law changed in 2019 to give single people the same surrogacy rights as couple, there have been 2,162 applications from intended parents in England. A total of 293 would-be fathers are over 50, both solo and in couples, according to figures released following a Freedom of Information Act application from The Mail on Sunday.
Gift to the taxman
As Keir Starmer struggles to balance the government’s books – and his staff pay bill – help is at hand: people making voluntary donations to the nation’s coffers.
Already this year, 18 people have handed over almost £620,000 without the taxman even asking for it, according to figures obtained by the BBC in a freedom of information request.
In the past two decades a total of 153 donations have been made to the Treasury, including 27 people who left money to the chancellor in their will.
It has bolstered the national accounts by £4,729,091.92 since 2003, equivalent to 0.00004% of total government spending this year.
Image by Nic Wood on Pexels
